My first epic dream was about being in school, not my school, I suspect it was a very old-fashioned school, there was fagging and beating, horrible uniforms and miserable classes. The one class I remember clearly was a Chemistry class and now I come to think about it, I felt a bit like Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, I was quite out of my time, in the class kids were doing experiments with Bromine and Acids, no safety equipment, no fume hoods and there were quite a lot of explosions. I was trying to warn people and stop them using these dangerous things without PPE but nobody would listen.

The rest of the dream was just ordinary school classes, day-to-day life at a boarding school although there were no holidays that I remember.

I woke up and went to the loo, then back to sleep and I had a dream about living in a little seaside town, nothing out of the ordinary (I was a teenager though) and then a coach party of elderly people came to the seaside for the day, they were quite different to your usual elderly beach group, they were on all the fairground rides, dancing to the music from the band on the seafront and a couple of them were even rollerskating along the seafront.

Later as night fell, they'd whipped up all the locals into a massive beach party and all the old people started growing fangs and becomming vampires, jumping on the locals and biting them. I was part of a group of other teenagers who were "being cool" and sitting apart from the grown-ups, but we'd apparently been expecting trouble because we all drew holy water guns, stakes and crosses and set about killing all the vampires. One of the kids was the daughter of a vicar who arrived later and blessed the sea, turning the tide into holy water, so we simply drove all the remaining vampires into the water where they burned and turned to dust.

I woke up with my alarm as we were watching the ashes drift out with the morning tide.

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<div class='signature'>"Why do the people who know the least, know it the loudest?"

The night before last I had a very long involved dream in which I woke up in the house I currently live in (with Mr Red) but I was still with my ex-husband. In the dream I woke up thinking that my current life was the dream, but bsolutely certain that Mr R was real and was out there somewhere just waiting for me.

I packed up all my stuff from the house and piled it all into Horace and then set out, firstly I went down to where Mr Red works currently but they'd never heard of him, they were all incredibly freaked out that I knew who they all were and knew things about them and their company and I told them that when I found Mr Red I would get him to apply for a job there.

I then left and drove to Reds Mums house, she was at work so I had to wait on her doorstep until she came home. She was lovely (she is) and sat me down with a cup of tea while I explained all about the dream and that I was trying to find her son. I was able to tell her things that only I would know, how her house used to be laid out, all the things I know about her, Lorraine, Darren, Reds Dad etc etc and she had no choice but to believe me.

She gave me the mobile number she had for Red (which is the same number he has in real life obviously) and she called him while I was sitting there in her living room. She explained everything to him and he said he'd come over right away. He was living in Stratford on College Farm and drove to his Mums that afternoon.

When he arrived, it was just like we'd always known each other and was pretty much a carbon copy of how we actually met in real life. He just couldn't get over how I knew everything about him, as the longer we talked the more and more familiar we became. We spent the whole night sitting up in his mums living room just talking, catching up and being amazed at being together.

It was a really nice familiar and comfy dream, all about that fantastic feeling of finding your perfect person, realising they feel the same and the wave of euphoria and contentment that settles over you.

Last night I had a slightly different dream, it was an old-people dream where Red and I were both retired, travelling about seeing all the places we hadn't visited before. It was a really nice inspiring sort of dream with an underlying feeling of being settled and happy.

LMAO I spent about 12 hours strait playing Minecraft, and now I get nervous in the dark and have nightmares thinking I need more cactuses and fire to defend my kitchen door <!--emo&:unsure:--><img src='http://i2.ifrm.com/html/emoticons/unsure.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='unsure.gif' /><!--endemo-->

A small girl turned into a little furry monkey type creature. I started crying sunflower seeds, which the monkey plucked from my left eye with spindly little finders and ate. I could feel the seeds squeezing through my tear duct <!--emo&:unsure:--><img src='http://i2.ifrm.com/html/emoticons/unsure.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='unsure.gif' /><!--endemo-->

Later the seeds turned into kidney beans which we kept in a jar. Except they weren't real beans; they were more like kidney stones that looked like beans. They didn't taste very nice. <!--emo&:mmm:--><img src='http://i2.ifrm.com/4013/140/emo/mmm.png' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mmm.png' /><!--endemo-->

1. I'm running around a scrap yard and trying to look for something/someone. The entire scene is purple - like looking through a purple lens. The scrapyard has towers of cars. There's a huge monster robot that I'm trying to hide from but never see. Turns out I'm trying to find KITT from Knight Rider except he's in a stack of vehicles that have not been crushed but he has been damaged by the robot.

2. Very weird. I dreamt I was in a barn in the middle of nowhere. There's huge empty banquet type table down the middle. Suddenly Mumm-Ra and LionO are battling it out (in cartoon form) and burst through the barn entrance. I'm hiding somewhere. Think it was under the table or in the rafters.

3. A semi-lucid dream. I can't recall how it starts. In real life, there was a girl I had a mega-crush on. Turns out she is at a camp near a lake. I somehow get there and try to find her. When I can't, I float into the air and start flying around the lake to find her. The alarm goes off just before she turns her head to me. Very frustrating.

Myself and KW led a group of school children abroad to see a duckling they had sponsored.

The duckling was in a prison cell made of iron bars. There were 4 cells in total, all opening onto a central area for exercise. We had a key to get in and we let the duckling out to play before going back outside and locking the door. I explained that tomorrow would be one of the other animal's turns. There was a gorilla, a gazelle and a tiger.

We were all stood around thinking it looked rather grim, but this was presumably a better life for the dangerous duck than the one we had rescued it from. At that point, the gorilla cage door opened. "That's not supposed to happen - I hope he doesn't like to eat duck!".

The gorilla was then quickly followed by a couple of thugs that had been locked in the same cell. "It's OK" I said - "The outer door is locked". They then produced a key and let themselves out. The other cell doors then also opened, and the escaped tiger caused everyone to panic and scatter. The thugs vanished in the confusion. I commented that the gazelle probably had more to be afraid of than anyone else, given the tiger's preferred menu.

We were in a large private garden behind a large building with a kind of moat. Some of the children jumped into the moat to escape the tiger, while the rest of us ran to higher ground to watch. Someone said "help will be here soon". I reassuringly replied "More likely they're going to drop in marines to kill us all, and the animals too".

I observed that some of the children in the moat appeared to be escaping into a dark area under the building. I went to follow saying I would get help. There was a passage out to the front, and a very narrow pathway behind a high wall. The busy main shopping road was just over the wall. There was a row of gaps like iron windows which I imagined some of the children had escaped through, but I was too fat. A little further along was a gate, bolted on the outside.

I couldn't reach the bolt, but at that moment B's lanky teenage son happened along. I asked him to let me out. He laughed at me, and then totally failed to open the bolt due to extreme teenage clumsiness. I got frustrated and just shoulder-barged it. The catch gave. Once outside, I closed the gate and bent the catch just enough to hold it closed.

I then had to get back inside. For various reasons I decided to climb up a tall sloping wall and run along the top of a large row of army tents that were leaning against the building. An elderly British soldier stuck a bayonet through the roof of a tent and almost shot me. I think he was from Dad's Army. He was fine when he realised I was one of the good guys.

I continued along the tent roofs over the Japanese soldiers. By some miracle they didn't spot me. I then came to tents full of naked Japanese women. They were very blurry and I was frustrated. A dream-lord explained to me that it was to comply with Japanese censorship regulations, and it hadn't stopped the production being the 6th biggest seller of the year.

There are a number of theories about why we dream, the connection between short and long term memory, the processing of what has gone before, problem-solving, the importance of REM in the sleep cycle and so on. Nobody really seems to have a definitive answer and given my dream-life, I'd really like someone to answer the question once and for all!

Recently, I've been having a series of different disturbing dreams, that feel as though I'm being actively tortured by my psyche, I have woken up sobbing like my heart was broken, in a total state of paranoia and with a massive self-esteem and confidence crash, which given the epic way in which I dream is proving harder and harder to get past. It's complicated by the fact that I don't always remember these dreams and it's really disorientating to wake up in floods of tears with no idea why!

Last night was just such a night and I'm really struggling this morning, I slept perfectly normally for the first part of the night, I had an excellent dream about hot-air ballooning and then I woke up. No big deal and I went back to sleep without too much trouble. I then started having a cacophony of just spiteful and awful dreams, I kept waking up feeling terrible but then getting dragged back down again to be tortured some more.

By the time I woke up properly I was beside myself, I've been up for an hour and a half now and I can't stop myself breaking into fresh waves of tears whenever I think about it, but I can't remember any of the details of the dreams so that I can mentally refute them.

So, my question is; Why?

Why would my own brains be doing this to me? What possible benefit to my psyche could this torture represent? More importantly, now that I'm awake and in (mostly) rational control again, why can't I shake it off?

Amongst the things that are bothering me about it is why the secrecy? What can the dreams have been about that is so awful that my conscious mind has to hide them from me?

As for me, I'm now going to spend the day trying to get a grip on my Emosh and building back the positive before I have to go back to bed tonight!

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<div class='signature'>"Why do the people who know the least, know it the loudest?"

I had a horrible night of awful dreams, one of those where you keep waking up with very little idea of who or where you are, the entire night was a litany of the things I hate the most, things that have hung over from school, that affect me right to the core and I have woken up this morning feeling depressed, tired, quiet, sad and tearful.

I also woke up feeling real animosity towards some people who don't really deserve it. In my dreams I was let down again and again, overlooked for things that were really important to me, ignored and left by myself in a strange city where I couldn't find my train ticket and didn't have anywhere to stay by myself. It was heart-breaking and terrifying in equal measure and am really disorientate to find myself awake and in my lovely life again.

I am really affected by my dream life far more than anyone else I know.

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<div class='signature'>"Why do the people who know the least, know it the loudest?"